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The windows of the Odessa Art Museum’s colonnaded halls are covered with plywood, shielding them from the threat of air raids. Last year, a Russian missile struck just meters away. The glass shattered, and paintings were damaged. The corridors that once displayed portraits in gilded frames and grand landscapes now stand empty. The priceless Tsarist-era collection has been evacuated to a safer place, into vaults or deep underground. Only the contemporary art section remains open.
At first, this feels like a disappointment. A small room, bare walls, none of the expected grandeur. But soon, it becomes clear what contemporary art means in Ukraine.
On the wall, a name: Maksym “Dali” Kryvtsov – machine gunner, poet, photographer. He died in January at the age of thirty-three, alongside his loyal frontline companion – an orange cat.
He had fought before. First in 2014, on Kyiv’s Independence Square. Then in Donbas. When the Russians came again in 2022, he took up arms once more. He fought, he wrote, he photographed. In 2023, he published a collection of poetry: “Poems from a Gunport” (Вірші з бійниці).
Now, this exhibition bears his name. “Dali: I Take My Life Back” – a line from one of his poems, written in his own hand on the wall of a Kyiv café. A trace of the poet that remains.
Kryvtsov’s manuscripts lie beneath glass. The letters are rounded, carefully written. Every word precisely chosen. The handwriting of a man who knew that words carry weight, that every line must be deliberate. That words can strike as hard as bullets.
my bullet-riddled rifle
will rust,
poor thing.
my spare clothes and gear
will be passed to the recruits.
but let spring come soon,
so I can finally
bloom
as a violet
-Maksym “Dali” Kryvtsov
In Kryvtsov’s photographs, we see portraits of his comrades and landscapes filled with light. A small statue of the Virgin Mary, its details worn away, with a beam of light behind it. Sunflowers against the sky. Beneath them, the scarred earth. Above them, the endless blue. A dark, damp trench where sunlight still finds its way. And in a soldier’s lap, curled up during a lull in the artillery fire, the orange cat.
Many of these photos are in black and white, but then – color. A sudden, forceful flash, as if life itself refuses to be erased. It recalls old films, hand-colored frame by frame, painstakingly brought to life, touched by some unknown magic.
Nearby stand Dali’s personal belongings: cameras, a small book of Lesya Ukrainka’s poetry, a wristwatch, and a larger book – The Ideology of Ukrainian Nationalism. On its cover, the symbol ꑭ. A combination of N and I – Ідея Нації. The Idea of the Nation. It is also a runic sign, shaped like a medieval wolf trap, a hidden hook that latches unexpectedly into the prey’s throat. A symbol of the hunt and the hunted. A mark of strength and resistance.
It has become, alongside Ukraine’s Trident, one of the emblems of the struggle for freedom.
The fallen artist’s personal belongings.
The exhibition continues with a series of press photographs.
The museum is silent, and the silence presses against the ribs. The images on the walls are more than just photographs. They are messages, fragments of a conversation no one wanted to find themselves having.
A soldier sent these messages from the front. A photojournalist framed them in black and white. They belong together.
The words are simple.
one day everyone will leave.
the story will stop being that interesting for foreigners.
this war will be too long and too bloody –
it’s impossible to edit and publish.
The exhibition is not properly arranged. There is no order, no instructions. The pictures are scattered like debris. You see a man smoking a cigarette among the ruins of his home. You see a woman in a bloodstained coat, holding a child’s toy. You see an elderly couple sitting on a bench, looking at something that is no longer there.
one day we will sit in the kitchen and keep silent for hours.
one day we will sit in the kitchen and I hope
I have someone to talk to and you will come back alive.
I know this day will come.
I hope we will chat
and my voice does not tremble as now.
I hope and I love you too.
A picture of a soldier leaning against a tank, eyes closed. A picture of an empty chair. A picture of a dog sleeping beside a grave.
You move to the next wall.
one day alarm sirens will shut up.
one day we will have so many houses that no one returns to,
because the owners of these keys have been killed in their yards.
one day we will find the last unburied body.
The floor creaks as you step closer. You look at the map. But it is not just a map. It is a cemetery without headstones or names.
You step back. The museum is silent. Outside, life goes on.
Picture this: A dark trench. The air is heavy with the weight of war, with the smell of gunpowder. Outside, shells rip through the sky, and the earth trembles. But inside a dimly lit bunker, Captain Borys Eisenberg paints.
Watercolors. Soft, translucent layers on warm paper. Delicate lines forming leaves, wildflowers, stems. He carefully writes their Latin names along the edge of the canvas.
13 July 2023 – Kurdiumivka. He runs under fire toward a badly wounded soldier. Drags him to cover, stops the bleeding. Refuses to leave him behind.
Then comes the shell. Borys Eisenberg dies.
Paintings by Borys Eisenberg, painted during the battle of Bakhmut.
Before the war, he was a landscape architect. He ran a tree nursery, one of the best in Odessa. The trees he planted still grow in city parks. He knew how to shape landscapes, how to make the world bloom. And in war, something drew him back to that purpose.
24 February 2022, the full-scale invasion begins. Borys Eisenberg does not hesitate. He joins the Ukrainian Armed Forces. His callsign is Borysych. He becomes a rifle company commander in the 28th Mechanized Brigade.
In Mykolaiv, he fights on the front lines, leading his men in battle, pushing the Russians back. He is awarded the Medal for Bravery. Then comes Kherson. He helps liberate occupied lands. When the south is secured, he is sent east – to Bakhmut.
There, he builds fortifications, positions that hold the front line near Kurdiumivka for seven long months. He stands with his men – always close, always under fire. When they are hit, he carries them out. He personally saves over twenty wounded soldiers, dragging them from the artillery fire with his own hands.
In the winter of 2023, he starts stepping beyond the trenches, past the barbed wire and earthworks. He takes photographs of the land – its quiet resilience, its understated defiance. Then, he begins to paint again.
“Art is what you share with others, in the circumstances you cannot choose,” he tells a friend who invites him to an exhibition.
But he does not paint only on paper. A flower blooms on an ammo crate lid that once held shells. A river flows across a metal plate ripped from a war machine. His brushstrokes fight back, defying the destructive purpose of the material beneath them. What war leaves behind, he gathers: shards of steel, splintered wooden frames, pieces of something once whole. And life prevails.
In the horrors of Bakhmut, amid the ruins, Borys Eisenberg finds nature’s quiet triumph. He paints what others fail to see. A leaf beside a rusted helmet. A wildflower growing at the edge of a shattered trench. Light cutting through smoke. He does not paint victory or defeat. He paints what is eternal. His paintings speak, softly but powerfully – more than any war report ever could.
Anastasiia Kolibaba was born the same year as me. Her exhibition is called Eclipse.
Once, a solar eclipse meant doom. The wrath of the gods. The end of the world. But Kolibaba’s eclipse is different. Here, colors fade slowly. Time itself blurs. Her monochrome, almost grisaille-style paintings depict war in shades of gray, in fading light. They drift somewhere between night and dawn, between despair and survival. There is no clear line, only shadow. Not the darkness of night, not the darkness of sleep. This is the darkness that comes when the world is burning.
The landscapes are shattered. War has torn them apart. Cannon barrels stand like dead trees, rusted, still, sinking into the scarred earth. Fields are pockmarked with craters. Roads are nothing but faint ghosts of what they once were. Suffering, doubt, hope – they all blend together, like smoke rising over a ruined city. And yet – the land endures. Scarred. Tortured. But alive.
And then there are the soldiers.
A man stands in the dim light – not as a monument, but as someone alive. No grand gestures.
No forced solemnity. A maimed soldier stands like an ancient sculpture, missing an arm and a leg. He leans on crutches, but he still stands. Flesh that can be wounded. A heart that still beats.
A hero bleeds. A hero laughs. A hero fights. Because there is no other choice. And here, within these walls, they are remembered – not as myths, not as names in a memorial book, but as men, women, people.
Art by Anastasiia Kolibaba.
In the corner of the gallery stands a long table. A row of burned clay skulls rests upon it, each with a Z carved into the crown. The skulls are empty and silent. Remnants of a fallen empire.
They lie there like abandoned relics, stripped of meaning, stripped of power. The clay is dry, cracked. Once, it was shaped into something meant to last. Now, it crumbles at the edges, unable to withstand time. A fitting end for a false grandeur.
Every Ukrainian knows what Russian power is – rotting, hollow, built on lies. The skulls lie there like toxic relics, a reminder of waste, futility. The glory of the empire crumbles like cheap plaster. Russian soldiers die for nothing. These skulls are not a warning – they are a mockery. The empire worshipped death, draped it in medals, called it victory. But in the end, there is only dust.
“From dust you were taken, and to dust you shall return.”
Kolibaba’s art does not offer answers. It leaves you in a blurred moment, where time dissolves, where boundaries fade. She captures that state where you do not know whether the world is on the verge of dawn or eternal night.
But there are others who see war not as uncertain and obscured, but as sharp, distorted, undeniable.
Where Kolibaba paints an eclipse, Dmytro Moldovanov hurls colors onto canvas like an explosion. In his world, there is no doubt. War is chaos. Beasts attack. Demons dance. And man must resist them.
There is no order in these paintings. No perspective. No realism. No academic precision. Everything is crooked – but that is the point. Dmytro Moldovanov paints with reckless honesty. His figures float, untethered from the earth. People stretch like animals. Animals gaze like people. The colors are too vivid, the scenes too raw. It is at once a fairy tale and a nightmare, a myth and a reality. Moldovanov does not depict tanks or explosions. Yet you feel the presence of war – in twisted faces, under a bloody sky.
He wanted to blend styles. Impressionism, expressionism, surrealism—but in the end, he paints himself and the world around him. And yet, his work is neither sad nor chaotic. It is war as seen through eyes that refuse to accept its cruelty as normal. But Moldovanov does not paint war as tragedy. He paints it as a battle that must be won.
A canvas leans against the easel – painted in February 2022. “Hearing the Wolves.” Three deer stand frozen. One lowers its head, antlers ready. It knows what is coming. The wolves are not in the painting. But you can hear them.
These paintings pull you in. Bold colors, wild movement. The animals are alive. They watch you, wait, judge. Tigers, lions, bears.
These symbols are older than memory. They carry history, legends. Long ago, tigers roamed the banks of the Dnipro. The princes of Kyiv hunted them. Now they roam Moldovanov’s canvases, fighting battles that feel both ancient and modern, both yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Moldovanov paints the city like only a naïvist can: raw, unpolished, bursting with life and menace. A tiger stalks the streets. A lion stands in the central square. But war is war – chaotic, violent, unreal. The invaders are not men, they are beasts. Small, twisted creatures. A hydra with countless heads. A monster with the body of a tank and the muzzle of a cannon. Missiles streak across the sky, marked with a Z.
Painting by Dmytro Moldovanov.
Colors clash, raw and unblended. The ground is brown, scorched. The sky is heavy with smoke. In the center, a Cossack warrior dances. He has five arms, all in motion. He tramples demons underfoot, pressing them into the mud. His face is calm. He has done this before.
Moldovanov has often mentioned Niko Pirosmani as an influence. There’s a story about how he once tried to see a Pirosmani exhibition in Kyiv. He waited in line at the National Art Museum, eager to see the works of the great Georgian painter. But when he finally entered, the emotions overwhelmed him. The paintings hit him so deeply that he could not hold back tears. So he turned around – and left. Without even looking at them properly.
That is how true artists see the world, not through technique, but through feeling. This is what contemporary Ukrainian art is. Colors pushed to their limits. Symbols layered like thick paint on a canvas. Animals with human faces. There is no gravity here – only the weight of myths and war, disguised as a fairy tale.
One painting shows a small café on the side of a road. Soldiers, rifles slung over their backs, drink coffee and wait. It feels like that very café we passed in Pokrovske. Or maybe just outside Kramatorsk. The soldiers try, for a moment, to forget that war waits for them just a few kilometers away. We have seen this scene so many times on these roads.